Posts Tagged ‘Business’

Reliability – not price – is what really matters to resellers and customers when it comes to connectivity says Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing at Entanet.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing

It’s always easy to focus on price when it’s all that the customer seems to be focused on and especially when connectivity services are promoted as a commodity. Do businesses really want a cheap service that can’t be relied upon?

At Entanet we’ve never espoused or promoted the low-cost-only route to selling. We always encourage and support our partners in promoting the key values of connectivity and, while this may seem like an obvious point to make, it’s one we believe is important to re-iterate time and time again because it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of selling on price and little else in a competitive and crowded market.

In last weeks article (Part one) we started to look at the ‘connectivity scale’ and looked at the growing options around copper and fibre based broadband that are driving customers’ expectations of faster and more reliable services. Today we look at Ethernet based products that build on these expectations and deliver service attributes that are even more essential to business critical connectivity. Let’s start with GEA…

Stephen Barclay, Head of Sales

GEA

GEA is a new service which begins to bridge the gap between fibre broadband and Ethernet based solutions. Like FTTC, GEA utilises the existing copper infrastructure (a single copper pair) between the customer premises and the cabinet and then uses fibre back to the exchange. However, from the exchange it delivers the traffic across the Ethernet core network, not the broadband one. This means it can deliver an uncontended and dedicated service with service guarantees. GEA provides a comprehensive SLA, choice of backup options and a 9 business hour return to service guarantee, making it an attractive and cost effective option for business customers looking for a guaranteed service with short installation times and symmetrical speeds from 2Mbps up to 20Mbps.

Just when you think you’ve got to grips with all the latest connectivity technologies, their features and how to confidently sell them, another one emerges!

With the launch of GEA (Generic Ethernet Access) you could be forgiven for being confused as to where broadband connectivity ends and Ethernet based connectivity begins. So, in this two part article we thought a little clarification of the key differentiators may be useful.

Are you aware that Ofcom recently extended its General Condition 4 to cover VoIP services which means that, like traditional telecoms (PSTN and ISDN providers) and mobile operators, VoIP providers now need to provide the emergency services with location information for the users of their VoIP services?

Jon Farmer, Voice Technical Lead

The problem is that it’s not as simple as you might think. The flexible nature of VoIP is one of its biggest selling points. But it also means that the location of the end user can easily and quickly change, which means location information held by the provider can quickly become out of date and useless to the emergency services. This has been an area of debate among VoIP industry players for many years.

The reforms to Ofcom’s General Condition 4 have forced VoIP providers to act and Entanet has been amongst the first to do so, working to develop a new, secure and brand-neutral website (www.999-location.co.uk), via which end users can easily update their location information for each VoIP number they use. In addition, we have even created a short animated video to demonstrate the importance of keeping this information up to date to end users.

Recently, the UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) officially announced the finalists for its 2011 Internet Hero and Internet Villain awards. Both categories recognise those who have either done the most or least to help the Internet Industry. This year, ISPA’s finalists are:

Internet Hero Finalists

Rory Stewart MP – For his trailblazing efforts to bring broadband to his rural constituency of Penrith and the Borders

Twitter – For its role in helping people communicate during the Arab spring

Judge Colin Birss QC – For his considered and damning judgement on the ACS Law that it was “chaotic and lamentable”

The Australian Internet Industry Association – For taking the lead and launching a voluntary industry code on infected machines in Australia

Prof. Ian Hargreaves – For authoring a review that makes recommendations on how IP can be made fitter for the digital age

Customers are becoming increasingly reliant on fast, resilient broadband connections. Now that the availability of new fibre based broadband is increasing, we would like to know if Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) is something you are interested in. We have therefore added a new poll to gain your feedback. Please also feel free to leave us a comment below.

Technological change is happening at such a pace that it’s getting difficult to remember when things started happening. A year or so ago there was another phrase being brandished around causing our CTO to shout out that he’d completed yet another line on his iPhone’s ‘Buzzword Bingo’ app – ‘the cloud’.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing

Of course the concept is nothing new – reducing cost, simplifying IT management and improving flexibility by hosting stuff centrally has been around for a while, although described in other terms. More recently however, it seems everyone’s talking about ‘the cloud’ and how you need to get your head into it if you’re selling to businesses. It’s easy to see why too. The analyst, Gartner, predicts a 19 percent increase in cloud services revenue globally in 2011, even if it’ll only account for 2.3 percent of the entire IT market spend. A massive 83 percent growth by 2014 is forecast too.

As a voice or data reseller though, it’s important to keep your feet firmly planted if you’re going to entertain spending even more of your valuable time and resources (and money) marketing ‘services in the cloud’. The one thing that underpins the successful sale of cloud-based or hosted services – whether they offer VoIP, software apps, email or something unique – is the stability, performance and reliability of the underlying connectivity infrastructure.

The controversial Digital Economy Act (DEA) has once again hit the headlines with news that it has been officially delayed until spring 2012 at the earliest. The news will come as no surprise to many within the industry, as the complex Act has been plagued by debate at every stage since its original conception.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing

“Since the DEA passed into law there has been a considerable amount of work to do to implement the mass notification system. Secondary legislation setting out how the system will be paid for and how it will work has to be passed by Parliament. Ofcom also has to set up an appeals process” said a spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

The latest delay can be attributed to a number of factors including the ongoing debate over the allocation of costs between rights holders and ISPs (Opinion.enta.net: DEA passes buck to ISPs), ongoing concerns regarding using IP addresses to ‘identify’ alleged offenders , the latest review of website blocking proposals, the Judicial Review brought by BT and TalkTalk which started this week and of course the problems Ofcom has encountered with its code of practice.

In the face of widespread debate about net neutrality and increasing consumer unrest about how Fair Use Policies and traffic management affects their broadband experience , the Broadband Stakeholder group (BSG) and seven of the UK’s largest ISPs have published a new Voluntary Code of Practice regarding broadband transparency. This new code of practice will be piloted by BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media, O2, Three and Vodafone throughout 2011, with review and potentially further adoption by other ISPs in early 2012.

Neil Watson, Head of Service Operations

Commenting on the new code Antony Walker, CEO of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, said:
“There has been more heat than light in the debate about traffic management over recent years. This commitment to provide clear and comparable information in a common format is very important. It will not only help to ensure consumers are better informed about the services they buy and use, but will also provide a clearer picture for policy makers of the way in which traffic management is actually used in the UK market.

Consumers need to be able to make informed choices about the services they buy and policy makers need to be able to make informed decisions about the policy and regulatory framework they set. This new commitment provides an essential building block for getting both of these things right.”

As the availability of ever faster broadband continues to increase thanks to technology advancement, we ask whether it signals the end of the line for leased line connectivity.

Stephen Barclay, Head of Sales

First it was ADSL2+ that brought us speeds of up to 24Mbps; then FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) was introduced to deliver up to 40Mbps; and now there are trials of FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) offering speeds of up to 100Mbps. Add extra service features such as Annex M on ADSL2+ for increased upload speed and Elevated Best Efforts (EBE) guaranteeing throughput over the BT network at the busiest times and you can see why it’s a relevant question.

For a business customer the latest broadband technologies available appear to have a lot to offer. For example, higher speed connections with an appropriate bandwidth allowance delivered over a provider’s network that has ample capacity can be good for businesses wanting to use them for VoIP, linking remote workers or accessing centrally hosted applications. As long as the service provider’s network is properly managed to minimise factors like latency, these customers can indeed use business focused broadband connections. We readily promote broadband for day-to-day business communication and have a lot of reseller partners with happy customers.

However, there are commercial and operational factors that can mean broadband doesn’t meet the mark. These generally depend on what business customers are trying to achieve, how critical the connections they’re using are to them and how important it is to ensure service continuity is guaranteed.